


Creatures of Stillness

by gaslightgallows (hearts_blood)



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Bathing/Washing, F/M, Facial Shaving, First Time, Introspection, Masturbation, Oral Sex, Reunion Sex, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-25
Updated: 2016-03-16
Packaged: 2018-05-16 05:15:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 17,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5815609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearts_blood/pseuds/gaslightgallows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack turns up at Phryne's London flat, dirty and disreputable-looking and unshaven, and the most beautiful thing Phryne's ever seen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [deedeeinfj](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deedeeinfj/gifts), [Sarahtoo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sarahtoo/gifts).



> For everyone who asked for an expansion of the "Scruffy Jack" drabble ([You Asked For It Ch. 195 “Vagabond”](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4799084/chapters/13002493)), but mainly for DeeDee, because she begged and she knows how susceptible I am to begging, and for Sarah, who prompted for the original drabble. ;)

_Creatures of stillness pressed out of the clear_  
_unravelled forest from lair and nest;_  
_and it came to pass, that not by cunning_  
_and not out of fear were they made so quiet,_

_but simply out of hearing._

_– Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, “First Sonnet”_

 

He’d wired her that he would be in London to meet her in time for the New Year. The telegram was propped against the ornate modern brass lamp on her bedside table as if it were a love letter (which it might as well have been) or an invitation (which she certainly hoped it was).

Phryne Fisher, alone for the evening in her flat, as she often preferred to be these days, reclined naked on her bed after her evening bath and regarded the telegram with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. He would be here in less than two weeks, and then... what? _“Come after me, Jack Robinson,”_ she had ordered him, and he had risen to the challenge and called her bluff, if bluff he thought it was. But then what had she expected to happen? That he would travel halfway around the world appear on her doorstep in black tie without any indication that she wanted more than a fling?

The truth was, Phryne hadn’t thought. At all. Not about flying her father home, not about daring Jack to follow her, not about kissing him eagerly when he tugged her into his demanding embrace. If he hadn’t pulled away for breath, she might well have studiously not thought about having her way with him right there on the air field, in full view of her father.

_“Come after me, Jack Robinson.”_

She had tried to make that clear, in the language that they had established as their own, in the playful, painful, purposeful give-and-take that marked all of their interactions, that she wanted him with her. She couldn’t promise always. Always was too frightening a prospect. But she could give him… what?

_“‘She makes hungry, where most she satisfies...’”_

_“And I’m not here to apologize...”_

_“Come after me, Jack Robinson.”_

Phryne sighed and slid her hands down her soap-clean body. She luxuriated in the feeling of satin coverlets against her skin, compared it to the feeling of Jack’s lips on her, and found it wanting. Wanting… she wanted him. As a lover, as a sparring partner, as an integral part of her life. Part of the tapestry, part of the dance.

_“I think we’re more of a waltz, Miss Fisher…”_

_“Steady me any time, Inspector.”_

_“Come after me, Jack Robinson.”_

Her hands dragged lazily over her breasts, tugging at her nipples, tracing her familiar contours with smooth fingers, remembering less-smooth fingers gentle against her bruised throat, in that dangerous delicious breathless moment that had been so sweetly promising and so quickly spoiled. If Dottie hadn’t walked in… what might have happened? The way he had touched her, met her joking in kind, the way he had looked at her, lips barely smiling, eyes blue and wicked and laughing, had promised… much.

_“Would you like me to improve on it?”_

_“More than anything.”_

_“Come after me, Jack Robinson.”_

She parted her folds and sank her fingers into her eager wetness, and lost herself in the memory of his voice, husky and low in the cool night air, his hand under her coat and warm against the small of her back, through the thin crepe of her blouse… and then later, with the oil-and-grass-scented breeze blowing about them, his hand in her hair and his tongue in her mouth.

_“Come after me, Jack Robinson.”_

_“Say it again.”_

_“Come after me, Jack Robinson”… Jack, Jack… come after me… come…_

“Oh Jack, _Jack!_ ”

She felt into the afterglow of the dream of his arms, and stayed there. She could have stayed there forever, and that was not nearly as terrifying an idea as she’d once thought.

Something jerked her awake, suddenly and unpleasantly.

She looked around in bleary-eyed confusion. Morning light trickled through her curtains, and there was a commotion in the hall.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m pretty sure Amelia’s accent is atrocious, but if it is, it’s not my fault, because I get all my accents from Dorothy Sayers’s books. Blame the queen.

“You can’t expect to see Miss Fisher at this time o’ the mornin’!” she heard her maid, Amelia, insisting. The girl was a product of the London charity school system and looked timid and underfed, but she was not to be trifled with. Certainly not by any demanding males. Phryne smirked to herself and prepared to roll over and go back to sleep. It was far too early for a lady of fashion to be stirring, and her unconscious had been rather pleasantly occupied. 

“She’s expecting me,” rumbled a low voice, decidedly male, surprisingly polite, rather tired, with a hint of a foreign accent, and… Phryne frowned. Surely she was still dreaming. 

“Miss Fisher’s not expecting _anyone_ at ‘arf-past eight in the morning,” said Amelia firmly. “Certainly not some filthy navvie from the colonies. She’s still in bed, as she always is at this time o’ the morning, which shows ‘ow much _you_ know.” There was another low murmur; Phryne didn’t catch the words but the mere sound was rapidly clearing the post-stimulation cobwebs from her brain. 

“It can’t be,” she murmured. “He’s not supposed to be here til the end of the month… my birthday was only two days ago.”

“I don’t care if you’re the Prince o’ Wales! ‘Detective-Inspector,’ indeed.” An audible sniff. “Catch a nice respectable pleeseman goin’ about with dirt under his nails and beard wot like them nasty anarchists wear. I’ll ‘ave you know that my young man is a cop an’ if he was ‘ere he’d give you what’s for, Mr. Robinson or whatever you calls yerself, fer impersonatin’—”

Phryne launched herself from the bed and grabbed for the nearest article of clothing that she had to hand. She threw the dressing gown around her shoulders and belted it haphazardly, and rushed barefoot into the corridor, through the sitting room, and into the foyer where her tiny maid stood arguing with a tall lean man in a much-abused fedora and a peacoat of indeterminate colour. Most of his face was hidden beneath a week’s growth of reddish-brown scruff, but he looked up at her entrance and nearly stopped her dead in her tracks with the sudden joy that leapt into his bright blue eyes.

“Miss!” Amelia cried. “I’m so sorry to have woke you, Miss Fisher, but this _gentleman_ refuses to go.” She cast a critical eye over her employer’s state of dress and calmly stepped between Phryne and the man at the door, to shield Phryne, clad only in a badly-tied green silk dressing gown that did absolutely nothing to disguise her essential nakedness, from view of this suspicious and dirty male person. “‘E _says_ you’re expectin’ him.”

“Thank you, Amelia,” said Phryne absently, with a smile for her maid and eyes for her visitor. “I have indeed been expecting this gentleman. But you’re early, Jack.”

Amelia’s eyes narrowed. “Says ‘e’s a pleeseman from Australia. I say ‘e looks like a sailor. Do they even _have_ policeman in Australia?”

“Indeed they do. And you’re looking at the best of them.”

The lips under the beard twitched, and so did Phryne’s heart. She reached into her dressing gown and pulled out a five-pound note. How the five-pound note had come to be in the pocket of one of her flimsiest dressing gowns, she couldn’t recall, but she dipped her hand into her pocket expecting money and money she found. She placed the note into Amelia’s hand. “Amelia, you’re a marvelous guard-dog. Take the rest of today off.”

If possible, Amelia’s eyes narrowed further. “Miss? You sure you’ll be all right? I can nip down to th’ station and have my Frank here in two ticks.”

“I’m safe as houses, Amelia, dear. Go. Tell Frank to skive off and take you to the pictures. Hell, take _him_ to the pictures for a change. Have a grand time.”

Amelia didn’t ask twice. She’d learned right quick that when Miss Fisher’d made up her mind there was no use trying to change it. She turned and ran to her room to fetch her coat, and then scuttled past the strange visitor and went on her way. If her mistress wanted to give her the day off and threw five quid into the bargain, just so she could be alone with some nasty Australian (Amelia tended to forget that her mistress was also Australian), then that was the quality’s business. 

Phryne drew Jack Robinson into the hall of her little flat, held his hands tightly, and drank him in with her eyes. “You’re a beautiful sight,” she murmured, and meant every word of it.

His hair was longer than she’d ever seen it, a mess under the battered fedora that she still instantly recognized as the one she had given him. His normal olive complexion had been darkened by the sun to a deep, warm tan. The arms that Phryne slid delighted, disbelieving hands up before clasping behind his neck were harder and wider than she remembered, as were the hands that he tangled into her sleep-wild hair, and his lean face was buried under a beard that felt soft and foreign on her face when compared to the hard cheeks and jaw-line of her memory. 

“I’m here, Phryne,” he murmured between disbelieving kisses, pulling her closer against him. “I wanted to surprise you by being here for your birthday, but I suppose Christmas will do.”

“The fact that you’re here at all… I didn’t expect… Oh, God, you’re making me cry and that’s just entirely unacceptable!” She kissed him again, more firmly this time, plundering his mouth with her tongue to distract herself from the happy lump in her throat, and slinking her hands down Jack’s chest and waist and around to grab his ass. She felt him chuckle against her lips and the sound went straight to her knees. 

When she finally broke the kiss and looked up at him, she felt her heart clench again. _I might well be in love with you, Jack Robinson,_ she thought. That was how beautiful this vagabond of a detective inspector looked and felt, after four months without him.

Jack leaned his forehead against hers. His eyes were inexpressibly tender. “I’m here,” he said again, nuzzling her cheek with his lips, “and I’m exhausted and hungry and probably in need of delousing, and I don’t really think you asked me to come halfway round the world just so you could squeeze my bottom.”

Phryne chuckled softly. “No.” She reluctantly let him relinquish his hold on her, and then took his hand. “I’ll have a meal sent up for you, and then you’ll need a bath before I’ll let you anywhere near my bed.” She succumbed to giddiness and kissed him once more, quickly. “But that has its own charms.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's where the smut starts. ;)

Phryne’s flat was in an ultra-modern block of buildings intended for the wealthy, the idle and the aristo, and as such had no facilities of its own for the preparation of food, but the restaurant on the ground floor produced gourmet and glorious food for the tenants at all hours of the day and night. “It’s not a picking on either Dot’s or Mr. Butler’s cooking,” she said, closing the door once more after the building’s staff had brought up a substantial meal and laid it out, and thinking longingly of her companion’s baking and her butler’s chicken fricassee, “but it’s definitely edible.”

Jack was already halfway through an enormous omelet, his scruffy cheeks distended with eggs and bacon. He had shed his abused fedora and the noxious peacoat and sat at her mahogany table in wool trousers she recognized and a heavy knitted jumper and boots that she very much did not. He swallowed reverently. “It’s a thousand times better than the slop I’ve been eating.” He reached for his teacup and drained down the contents in one gulp. 

Smiling, Phryne, her dressing gown now safely covering everything even hinting at danger, curled up in the other chair and reached for the teapot. She couldn’t seem to stop smiling. Jack. Jack was here. _Jack_ was _here_. She refilled his cup and then added a bare drop of milk. “No sugar,” she said, pushing the cup back. “I always thought that was odd, a man with such a sweet tooth as yours.”

“I like tasting my tea. Even the swill at the bottom of the station tea urn.” He wrapped his hands around the cup, closing his eyes and inhaling the fragrance of Darjeeling. The delicate porcelain seemed even more fragile in his enormous hands, fragile and beautiful and yet entirely safe in the cradle of his broad palms, of his work-worn fingers with their long phalanges, prominent knuckles, bitten nails (he had scrubbed the dirt from beneath them before sitting down to dine) on fingertips that seemed blunt and common in one light and sensitively tapered in another. His tendons cut sharply across the backs of his hands, and Phryne surrendered to the desire to reach out and trace them. 

“You weren’t supposed to be here for another week…”

He snorted softly. “And certainly not like this.” 

“So would you like to explain precisely why you’ve metamorphosed into a merchant sailor in the weeks between leaving Melbourne and arriving on my doorstep without so much as a by-your-leave?”

“Simply?” Jack smiled and paused to inhale his toast and jam, which Phryne had _not_ tried to steal and felt that she deserved praise for her thoughtfulness in not doing so. “Because I did become a merchant sailor. The steamer I’d booked passage on barely made it to Fremantle before the boiler exploded. The line was scrambling to make arrangements for the displaced passengers, but I couldn’t wait. So I got myself a place on a merchant ship hauling frozen mutton to England. They weren’t interested in passengers, but they weren’t averse to an extra unskilled deck hand.” 

“And how was the trip?”

He grimaced. “Well... I got here. But it’s not an experience I wish to repeat.” 

Phryne raised an eyebrow to cover the fluttering in her chest that she was certain he could hear, so rapidly did her heart begin to beat and her cheeks to colour. Like a bird in a cage… no, like a bird at a bright warm window in the winter, waiting to be let in. “Why did you put yourself through all that, Jack? I didn’t expect you until January. I could have waited.”

“...But I couldn’t.”

There were so many emotions coiling inside her belly and her blood that for a moment, Phryne didn’t know how to respond to that statement. “Let’s get you ready for that bath,” she said at last, rising from her chair and moving to stand beside him. His eyes were soft and liquid as she grasped the tattered hem of his faded blue jumper and pulled it up over his head. 

She dropped the worn knitwear to the floor and insinuated herself onto Jack’s lap, pressing her lips gently to his while her fingers worked at the mismatched buttons fastening his shirt closed. His facial hair, more than stubble but still less than a proper beard, surprised her again by being softer than it looked. It felt strange against her skin... strange and exciting. 

Jack’s hands rose and clasped themselves gingerly around her waist. He was trembling as she slowly undressed him, and she thought back to the night of Guy’s disastrous engagement party, to the gaudy night that never was, and the way Jack had looked at her as she loosened his tie. 

She pushed the braces from his shoulders and slid the sleeves of his shirt down his hard-muscled arms, letting the fabric fall over the back of the kitchen chair. Gently she ran her hands over his pectorals, firm and defined beneath the thin cloth of his singlet. “I’ll go run the water for your bath,” she murmured, tearing herself away. 

But Jack caught her hand. “I don’t feel as though I can let you out of my sight just yet,” he said, his smile lopsided and a little shy, as if embarrassed by the sentiment. 

Phryne blinked and then laughed delightedly. “Then come with me, Jack Robinson.” She tugged him up from his chair and led him from the dining room. 

Halfway down the corridor to the bathroom, Jack stopped and pressed her against the wall and kissed her so fiercely that her head spun. “God, Phryne, I’ve missed you so much,” he admitted, his voice rough and needy against her lips, and then against her throat. His hands were ghosting across her belly and her breasts and just barely brushing over her mound, all still covered by the thin film of green silk and therefore off-limits.

Phryne let her head loll back to give his lips more of a topography to map and pulled the skirt of her dressing gown back over her hips, wanting his hands. 

Instead, Jack dropped to his knees, pressing his lips fervently to her pubic bone. 

“Fuck, yes,” she whispered, and then gasped when he hooked his hands behind her thighs and pulled first one leg and then the other over his shoulders. 

Jack dragged his lips across the powder-soft skin of her inner thigh, the small prickles of his beard electric against the sensitive flesh. Phryne moaned aloud. She’d been pleasured by bearded mouths before, but Jack... Jack... “Make me come, Jack Robinson.”

He laughed against her mons pubis, his lips nestled in her damp curls, his scruffy chin nudging up against the hood of her clitoris. He spoke into her, and his words were muffled but perfectly understandable: “I traveled here with that precise intention, Miss Fisher.”

It was Phryne’s turn to laugh, giddy with lust and sheer joy. She was still Miss Fisher to him, ever and always, even with his face buried between her thighs. 

His hands spanned the globes of her buttocks, holding her up, digging into her flesh and anchoring her to his mouth. She fisted her fingers into his hair and moaned adorations and curses and promises she could never keep and pipe dreams she would find a way to make come true, while his teeth grazed delicately over and over her clit and his tongue licked her and teased her and fucked her into a bone-melting climax.

And when Phryne came back to earth from somewhere high in the fast-expanding universe, he was still there, kneeling beneath her, holding her up, her climax glistening on his beard like honey, and he looked up at her as he must have looked up at the stars during his grueling ocean voyage, entranced and longing and just a little afraid. 

Phryne relaxed her hold in his hair, stroking the wild strands gently. “I missed you, too.”

“I could take you right here...”

“Mmm, that _would_ be marvelous...”

“May I?”

She shook her head, smiling, and rubbed her thumb over his eyebrow. “I’m not quite prepared for that yet, Inspector. And you still need that bath. More than ever, now,” she added. “But there is one thing I don’t want the water to wash away...” She carefully swung her legs from his shoulders and slid down the wall to sit before him, and wrap her arms around his neck instead, so that she could thoroughly taste herself in his mouth.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Goddamn this one took its sweet time.

“What do you get the woman who has everything?” a former lover had practically wailed at her birthday party two days before. 

_A naked Jack Robinson,_ thought Phryne, surveying her kingdom as Jack peeled off the remainder of his clothing while the hot water ran into the tub. _That’s what._

_But as he said… Christmas will do._

She had seen him naked once, quickly, after he had been laid out unconscious on her bed and she had checked his head thoroughly for serious contusions. Her dear inspector was a little too prone to head injuries for her comfort, sometimes. But once she had ascertained that he would be fine once the whiskey cocktails and her father’s damned nerve tonic wore off, and before Mr. Butler had arrived, Phryne had taken a visual inventory of Jack’s body that she had carried with her for months.

The memory did not compare to the lithe, fully conscious and upright (in all senses of the word) man standing before her, with a wry little twist to his bearded lips that made Phryne suspect he knew _precisely_ what she was thinking of.

“So,” he asked conversationally, his arms crossed loosely over his chest as though he was not standing in front of her stark naked and with a prominent and slightly curved erection, on the floor of her veined-marble-and-green-tiled bathroom, “whose pajamas were they?”

“I’ll have you know they were freshly purchased that very evening.”

Jack’s eyebrows climbed an inch up his forehead. 

“Mr. Butler hurried out to buy them as soon as he and Father had hauled you upstairs.” 

“…At nine o’clock at night?”

From a distance of several months, Phryne could afford to grin at the memory of that awful night. “Mr. Butler is an angel. Although where he found a shop selling Chinese embossed satin sleepwear at that hour, I always thought it more prudent not to ask.”

“Hmph.” He stood calmly enough, watching her as she moved about the bathroom, gathering towels and soap and a thick bathmat. 

Phryne watched him out of the corner of her eyes, cataloging the changes in his body since the last time she had seen it without its customary protective wall of blue wool and silk necktie. He was even leaner than before, his ribs and hipbones slightly visible, his muscles even more pronounced. There were half-healed sores in rings on his wrists and bruises in various colours all over his person, and a clean white line across one bicep that had not been there before. But he didn’t appear ill or in pain, only physically exhausted, and quiet. And… serene. 

“Do I pass muster, General?”

She smirked at him over her shoulder. “I was half-hoping to see a tattoo. Since you decided to turn sailor while I was away.”

“It was a temporary career change. And don’t mention tattoos, please. I haven’t let myself have a drink since I left Australia; every time we made port even briefly, I had to be on my guard. My fellow deck hands kept threatening to get me drunk and bring me to a tattoo parlour.”

“Pity. You’d look rather dashing with a star on your arm. It would have gone so nicely with your new look.” She turned off the water and motioned for Jack to get into the long low tub, and then stood back and admired the picture he made from behind as he climbed in. 

Jack laid back in the steaming water and let out a groan of bone-deep appreciation. “I haven’t had one of these since I left Australia, either.”

Phryne wrinkled her nose. “I noticed.” She ran her hands through his hair, gazing down at him thoughtfully. “Do you mind if I vanish for a moment or two?”

“…As long as you come back.”

“Of course,” she assured him, and ducked out. In a minute she was back. She handed him the tumbler of whisky, swept up the skirt of her dressing gown and perched on the edge of the tub, noting as she did so that the water had caused his erection to subside a little... but only a little, as the head of his cock still protruded over the surface of the water. It was... oddly sweet. _What a strange thing to think._

The angle of her bare leg echoed back the dark triangle hidden under the bunched green silk, and her foot rested a breath away from Jack’s arm as he drank. He sipped the warming amber liquid carefully after months of enforced abstinence, and smiled tiredly up at Phryne. “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” she replied, very quietly. “This is… more than I expected. More than I hoped.”

His smile didn’t falter, but something in his eyes changed. “Did you doubt me, Miss Fisher?”

“Not for a moment. I doubted… myself.”

Jack pursed his lips. “That’s a first.” 

“I wasn’t sure if what I was offering was enough for you.” She swallowed once, unable to tear herself away from the warm sweet unreadable look in his eyes. “I didn’t think… I didn’t exactly spell out my intentions with any sort of clarity.”

It was Jack who finally looked away, dropping his eyes to his empty glass. “To be honest…” He set the tumbler on the floor and rested his hand on Phryne’s ankle. “I didn’t think, either. About whether what you were offering was enough for me, or even precisely what you were offering. All I knew was that you were gone… and that I couldn’t stay there without you.” He began to trace a slow wet fingertip up Phryne’s leg. “After that, I didn’t let myself think about what would happen when I got here. I just knew I had to get to London… to you.” 

His hand paused at the rucked hem of her dressing gown and he looked up. “Is that enough?”

The cataracts of emotion crashing through Phryne at that simple statement threatened the very foundations of the building, to say nothing of her composure. “Careful, Jack,” she simpered, taking refuge in flirtation, as always. “You’ll spot the silk.” 

In another second she was quietly cursing her hesitation, but he didn’t bat an eyelash. Instead, she watched his lips curl at their corners. “Then take it off.”

Phryne’s teeth tugged at her lower lip. “If I do… will you do something for me?”

“…Possibly. What?”

She laughed. “That you start washing, Jack Robinson.”

He quickly reached for the soap. 

Phryne hung up the crumpled silk, sighing at the rents and water spots a little wistfully. It was a lovely garment but it had never been intended for the vigorous work it had been put through this morning. It was probably beyond repair, and certainly beyond Amelia’s limited needlework skills. Not for the first time, Phryne missed her Dot’s fine hand. Still… she smoothed her hand down the smooth green folds. Beyond repair, perhaps, but too full of memories to give up just yet.

She returned to her spot beside the tub, grinning at the amount of lather Jack had already managed to work up. “You seem to be enjoying yourself thoroughly. You’re practically crooning.” She took the soap and face flannel from him, taking up where he left off. “I remember the first proper bath I ever had,” she said conversationally, pretending to ignore the hitch in Jack’s breath when her soapy fingers touched his chest. “I was fourteen. It was a surreal experience, let me tell you…” She trailed the cloth over his bicep. “How did you come by this scar?”

His shoulders twitched. It was either a nonchalant shrug or Jack trying to control himself while her breasts were in his face. If it was the latter, she wished he wouldn’t. “I said I didn’t drink while I was on the ship. My crew mates, on the other hand, could get rowdy. Only the skipper knew I was a police officer on land, but it meant he sometimes relied on me to break up fights. And there was one instance where the bloke had a knife.”

Phryne probed the muscle with fingers that remembered what they were looking for better than her mind did. “Did it give you much trouble?”

“No. Bled like a hog for a bit, then healed up fine.”

“Hmm.” She raised his arm to wash it thoroughly from shoulder to fingertips. “And these?” she asked, touching the sores round his wrist gently.

“Oh, nothing nearly as drastic. Just the result of weeks of a wet slicker on wet skin. I barely notice them anymore.” Jack smiled and touched soapy fingers to her face. “I’m all right, Phryne,” he promised. 

Her return smile was shaky and bright. _Oh Jack, Jack... what have you done to me? But I asked for this... I’ll just have to make the best of it._

After all, it wasn’t _that_ awful of a prospect. “You’re mostly clean, but your hair and beard are still a mess.”

He grimaced and ran a hand over his tangled locks. “This might be past salvaging. As to my beard...” He just smirked. “Well, I suppose I could shave it off... but you seem to enjoy it.”

Phryne reached for the shampoo and tipped a generous measure into her hand, and massaged the lather into his hair, and then into his beard. “It’s not at all the fashion for sober upright policemen, but as you’re already incognito...” She leaned down and kissed him, slowly, so as not to get the soap on their lips. It smelled like jasmine, and the scent mingled with the lingering essence she had left on his face, and blended into something incredibly heady. 

Jack slipped his hands around her waist. “Please,” he said, urging her to join him in the water. “Phryne...”

She nuzzled his nose and then kissed him softly. “A little longer, my Jack.” She smoothed the suds from his head and face. He closed his eyes and retracted his arms, and slid a little lower in the water, watching her ministrations through half-lidded eyes. His breath stuttered in a tell-tale pattern that she hardly needed a downward glance of her eyes to identify. “Did you often take yourself in hand while you were on that merchant ship, Jack?” she murmured, combing her fingers through his hair. “Did you think of me in your hammock or bunk or however you slept, and touch yourself, and make yourself come with my name on your lips?”

“Incessantly,” was his ragged reply.

“Mmm...” Phryne lifted her cupped hands to rinse the soap from his hair and his beard, working methodically, and still Jack fisted himself with slow, almost lazy motions. 

“Did you touch yourself, Phryne?”

She lowered her lips to his ear. “Just last night, Jack. I pretended I was in your arms, remembered the feel of your hands and your lips and your voice over my skin, and I came so hard I screamed you name.” Her tongue flickered out to touch his earlobe, and he whimpered. “And then I fell asleep, and when I woke up, you were here... and you made me come again.” She kissed his cheek and slid a hand down his chest. “It’s only right that I return the honour.”

Jack’s hands fell away from his cock and Phryne wrapped her fingers around his thick length. She stroked up slowly, feeling the angle of the slight curve and the contours of each vein under her palm, rubbing gently under the corona of his cockhead, mapping him and committing the feel of him to memory. It was an effort she rarely made for her men. She passed her thumb over his glans and moved her mouth to his. 

His lips parted for her at once, and again, he tried to pull her into the tub with him. “I’ll stay mostly dry for the moment, thank you, Inspector,” she teased, nipping at his lips and twisting her hand round the base of his cock. 

“Christ, Phryne!” Jack gasped, kissing her hungrily but relinquishing her for the moment, and sliding his wet hands into her hair. “I want to touch you...”

“You pushed me up a wall and had your delicious way with me,” she replied, pausing to cup his scrotum and roll his balls in her palm before returning to his penis, “and all I got to feel was your hair. I believe in fairness in love and lovemaking.”

“Yes, but my hair was part of the excitement for you,” he retorted, thrusting into her hand. “Ph-phryne...” She slowed to let him catch his breath, and watched his face closely. If he insisted, or truly became upset, she would give way, but he seemed to understand the rhythms of the game. 

Of course he understood. Jack always seemed to understand her when she most needed him to. 

His chest rose and fell with his laboured breathing. His hands in her hair drew her forward and he kissed her deeply. “Make me come, Phryne Fisher,” he growled. 

She tightened her fingers around his cock, stroking first hard and fast, then slowly and gently, teasing and testing until she found the rhythm that tested his limitations and finally shredded them. He spasmed in her hand, shooting off in the bathwater and moaning her name into her mouth. 

Phryne uncurled and trailed her fingers over his thigh. “Better than a dream?” she asked, nuzzling his scruffy cheeks in between soft kisses. 

Jack’s smile was lazy and faraway. “Worlds better.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd originally planned for six chapters, but AO3 ~~kept defaulting to /?~~ decided there should be more. So there will be more.

They made a feint towards drying one another off, but it was a lost cause, and soon they were stumbling back into the bedroom and onto the bed and then Phryne was on her back, and Jack was on top of her, his hands mapping her wet body and his mouth plundering hers. “Are you ready now, Miss Fisher?”

She had put her diaphragm in place before bringing him his whisky, but it had been so much fun to draw him out a little longer… “Ready and waiting, Inspector.”

His long-lashed eyelids fluttered closed. “Phryne…” He husked her name across her skin with every breath as he trailed his lips between her breasts, his scruffy chin and cheeks scraping lightly over her ribs and belly and making her ripple beneath him, his tongue tracing little mazes through her pubic hair. His fingers spread her labia and he tasted her again, more gently this time, more slowly, taking his time. 

All the time in the world… would it be enough?

“Jack… Jack…” He licked the flat of his tongue over her clitoris and then closed soft lips around the little nub, suckling, which his fingers dipped into her. _“Jack...”_

She looked down to see him slick his fingers briefly into his mouth, sucking her fluids and watching her watch him. Then he placed both his hands firmly on her thighs and returned to devouring her. 

Phryne bit her bottom lip hard against a keen, feeling the heat beginning to coil more tightly in the cradle of her pelvis. His mouth was marvelous, but she’d had his mouth already. “Jack… please…” He looked up from her cunt and she held out her arms. “May I?” He crawled back up the long pale curve of her body and fitted himself into her embrace. “Jack, my Jack… you’re shaking.”

The corners of his lips curled upward as he kissed her. Phryne reached between them, closed her fingers around his cock and guided him into her aching flesh. Her breath snagged hard in her throat. 

He stilled instantly. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, yes… I just need a moment.”

“You’re sure?” He kissed the corner of her mouth softly, eyes dark and worried. “I can wait, I can stop if you’re not—”

“It’s been a while, Jack, that’s all. And there’s quite a lot of you for me to accommodate.” Lightly, soothingly, she smoothed her palms over his ribs, then up over his shoulder blades. “You’ve been very much in my thoughts lately. You… rather drove out my desire for anyone else.”

He blinked rapidly for a second or two. “Oh. … _Oh._ So when you said there was a whole world out there—” 

“I meant it. At the time.” His expression shifted into one of such awe and tenderness that she was momentarily speechless. Men had looked at her like that before, not with the same depth of history, perhaps, but with the same… love… That look had always been the signal that it was time for a liaison to end. But if Jack were to look at her like that for the rest of time, it wouldn’t be long enough. 

And that scared her. 

…Didn’t it?

“Phryne, I…”

Phryne buried her hands in his hair and stopped his mouth with kisses, hundreds, thousands of small soft hungry kisses. “Come with me, Jack Robinson,” she murmured, loving the taste of her on his tongue. 

“Anywhere, Phryne Fisher,” he growled, inching further into her. She arched her back and moaned, canting her hips to take him deeper, and Jack gathered her close, bowing his back and tensing with each thrust, already struggling to control himself, to wait for her. 

He felt wonderful, all lean hard muscle and callused fingers and trembling reverent deferential touches, filling her so completely with each thrust that she forgot she had ever needed oxygen. 

His face and body and his hands were beautiful, she had know that for months, but she had never once anticipated just how exquisite he would _feel_ … How had she managed to wait for this? If she had known, there would have been no waiting. She had never waited as long for any man as she had waited for Jack Robinson; she had never believed that any man could be worth waiting for. Her youthful proclivities had long since been refined into a partiality for sweet seduction, mutually-satisfying sex, and friendly goodbyes. The lovers she had taken with the intent of keeping them for a time had all paled in the end, and sometimes worse. Rene. Lyle Compton. Lin. They had all been good lovers. Some had even been good men. None of them had walked beside her the way Jack had. 

If he hadn’t… Well, she could have easily ruined herself for a man like Jack Robinson.

“Phryne,” Jack said huskily, locking his gaze with hers, his blue eyes concentrating on something far beyond the both of them, “Phryne… I love you. I love you… God help me, I love you.”

Her body quaked with each slow careful movement, threatening to reach completion too quickly, and Phryne grabbed hold of Jack’s hips, trying to still him. “Not yet,” she mewled, “damn you, how do you know how to… no, not yet, not yet!”

His lips crushed down on hers, gently relentless. “Come with me, Phryne Fisher.”

She let go.

...It was a world-shaking orgasm, the kind that shattered body and soul, and left her unable to think. The brain went dark. Speech became a vague and hazy memory. There was nothing left but sweaty skin, shaking limbs, and the sound of two sets of lungs trying to remember how to breathe. 

Eventually their breathing slowed, and they slept.


	6. Chapter 6

Phryne napped for twenty minutes and woke to find herself curled up on Jack’s chest, her head wedged under his chin and her hand fisted against his breastbone. He was not a soft pillow, she decided after a moment. He was all hard bits and knobs in awkward places. But she didn’t move. She nuzzled the crown of her head against his bearded chin, heard him grunt in his sleep, and smiled before dropping off again. 

Jack was still unconscious when she woke again, for good this time, somewhere around noon. Carefully she shifted and started to extricate herself from his embrace. His arms tightened at once. “Don’t go,” he mumbled. 

“Nature calls, my darling.”

His arms tightened. “Noooo…”

She laughed a bit at that, and kissed his lips briefly. “I’ll be back before you know it,” she promised. 

In the bathroom, Phryne tended to personal matters, retrieved and washed her diaphragm, and because it bothered her, combed her hair. The fine black strands were glamorous and fashionable and almost entirely natural, and once they knotted it meant either hours with oil and comb, or else the scissors. She’d ended up nearly bald as a young child once, after her mother had gone to Aunt Prudence’s for a visit and left her and Janey in the care of their father, who didn’t particularly care whether they paid any attention to hygiene or not. Being clean cost money, after all. Henry Fisher’s penchant for expensive hair pomade and manicures had come later, after the inheritance. 

Phryne paused to drain the bathtub, and considered the grime Jack had left on the pristine white surface. Was it worth it, to chance having a bath? Or should she wait until housekeeping came through on Saturday? After a few seconds of thought, she decided a shower would suffice. She needed it. Her limbs ached pleasantly with the morning’s exertions and her cunt reeked of Jack’s emissions. But not yet… not just yet. She looked again at the bathtub and curled her fingers almost into her palm, smiling with deep pleasure at the memory of making Jack come apart in the water. She would have liked to have joined him… but not in that filthy water. Perhaps later today, there could be a shower… and then after Saturday, there could be a bath…

She padded back into the bedroom, her bare toes clinging to the luxuriant carpets, and cuddled up next to her Jack. Without opening his eyes, he lifted his arm to make room for her, demonstrating that he was awake, if only just. 

“Mmm… feel better?”

“Worlds better. You?”

His brow scrunched in concentration. “Hungry.”

“Well, you worked hard after breakfast.”

“…Chilly.”

“Then we should get under the covers.”

Jack groaned and grumbled at being asked to move from his warm spot, but after Phryne had dragged the blankets out from under him and snuggled them both down securely, he rolled onto his side and pulled her close against him. “G’morning.”

“It’s actually more like half-past twelve,” Phryne smiled, stroking his cheek and beard with her fingertips. “Which is certainly morning for me.”

He bumped his nose against her forehead and then soothed the spot with his lips. “It’s strange… bed’s not moving.”

“When you’re a little more awake, we could fix that…”

Jack cracked an eyelid and looked at her with a familiar expression of fond annoyance. “I meant I’m not on-board the _SS Mutton_ anymore and my bed doesn’t go up and down with the swells. In fact…” He yawned and briefly let her go in order to stretch his long limbs. “I haven’t slept this well since I left Melbourne. Since you left Melbourne.”

He folded his arms around her in a gentle hug, gazing at her with soft sleepy eyes that warmed her thoroughly. “Did you entertain your shipmates with selections from Gilbert and Sullivan?”

“No, thank you very much. Although I did impress them with a yarn about Benito’s lost treasure and how I almost had a hand in finding it, if it hadn’t been for the lissome pirate wench who got to it first.” His voice lilted at her, teasing with the dry huskiness that she knew so well, but with a deeper note, promises of velvety dark secrets that rippled over her skin in the last breaths before he kissed her.

Phryne hummed contentedly into his mouth, stroking her tongue alongside his and relishing the feel of him between her lips. _Lissome pirate wench, indeed… You’ll make me swoon, Jack Robinson, and then where will I be?_ His tongue, his fingers, his cock, his voice, the very blue of his eyes… she wanted him inside her, all of him, and she wanted him to feel that same desire for her. To possess utterly, to consume entirely, to be complete with each other… 

It was a daring feeling, new-minted and old gold. She lived to adventure and to collect beautiful men’s hearts for a little while, but the temptation now was to keep this treasure, and the temptation was damning in its intensity. 

“You terrify me,” she murmured, curling her hands into fists on either side of his neck. He had come after her, sailed halfway round the world to find her… she had left him a map… and he had the makings of a fine beard now, like the pirates of her childhood fantasies. Men who ran after her were dangerous… what were the men who met her halfway, running towards her as she glittered through the dry grass of an airfield? “I could go on without you so easily… I could be happy… but the thought of leaving this bed and leaving you even for a moment makes me ache with sadness.” Phryne licked her lips, and then his, and pressed her mouth to his to forestall any response that might break the spell. 

When she did look up at him, anxiously, through long black lashes, his angular face was serene. “I know, Phryne. I know.”


	7. Chapter 7

He kissed her softly, stroked her shoulders and her spine and the small swells of her hips, as though trying to convey as much as possible through his touch that he was safe... or if not precisely safe, then nonthreatening to her, which was almost as good. 

Phryne returned his caresses ardently, putting all of her inexpressible emotions into her kisses, equally eager to show Jack that she wanted him, that she had no interest in dallying with his heart. But when he reached for her with more purpose, she snaked out of his grip. “I hate to leave you even for a moment, darling,” she purred, kissing his lips lightly, and then the tip of his nose, just because. “But before anything else happens, I need to wash. And my ingenious little device is sitting on the bathroom sink.”

“There’re plenty of other things we can do without it...”

She grinned slowly. “Jack Robinson. You _are_ a liberal-minded man.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Unfortunately not.” Phryne kissed him once more and then slid from between the sheets. “Right now I want hot water just a tiny bit more than I want you.”

“The hot water will still be there,” Jack pouted. A lock of unruly hair chose that moment to fall over his forehead. 

Phryne’s heart fluttered, but she held firm. “So will you,” she said. She brushed the lock of hair back from his face. Jack gazed up at her with an expression of quiet adoration. “Won’t you, Jack? You’ll stay?”

“I’ve nowhere else to go,” he pointed out wryly.

“...That’s not what I meant,” Phryne said, after a moment. “And you know it.”

“Yes. I’ll be here, Phryne.”

She gave his hair one last stroke and then hurried to the bathroom, shutting the door carefully to keep the heat in. The tub was a bit dingy from Jack’s bath, of course, but her skin cried out for that shower, and hopefully the hot water would wash away some of the grime. 

She ran the tap and laid out a clean towel for herself, tapping her foot anxiously on the tile floor as she waited for the water to heat up. Out of the corner of her eye, Phryne saw her reflection in the mirror, and turned to examine herself more closely. 

Her mouth was swollen from Jack’s kisses. There were small welts on her breasts from his fingernails, and small bruises on her throat from his hungry lips, and a very slight irritation on her thighs from his beard. She stroked the marks thoughtfully, tracing their edges and feeling the tiny pinpricks of pain that belied the pleasure that had caused them. She rarely let her lovers mark her in that way, or if she permitted it, she restricted their love-bites to places that would never be seen in public. 

She had given Jack Robinson her skin. He had asked and she had given and he had taken and worshipped her skin, and they had never exchanged a word about it. 

The water was steaming when Phryne stepped into the shower, but for a second or two, she shivered. 

‘You terrify me,’ she had said to Jack. And he did. The more she thought about it, the more frightened she was becoming. But it was not a fear of pain. There was no dull dread at the thought of Jack’s touch, and an argument with Jack would never lead to retribution when she least expected it. She wasn’t afraid of _him_. What she felt was the high fluttering fright that came with being offered the chance to take something she wanted, and hesitating because she was so sure that the beloved thing would fly apart the moment she laid her hands on it. 

_Essentially,_ she thought to herself, letting the hot spray beat against her back, _I’m still scared that he’s too good to be true._ “Which is a very silly thing to still be scared of,” she said aloud, reaching for the soap, “after he turned merchant sailor just to get to me a couple of weeks early.”

Over the sound of the water, she heard the bathroom door open and then shut. Phryne poked her head round the shower curtain and was greeted by a set of decidedly eager lips. “Not even for ten minutes?” she teased Jack. 

“Apparently not. If I’m intruding, I’ll go, but... the bed got cold, and I missed you.” 

Phryne glanced down. “Clearly,” she smirked. “Care to join me?”

“May I?”

She stepped back to allow him room. Jack stepped over the rim of the bathtub and pulled the curtain closed. Phryne dragged him under the spray and kissed him hard. “Did I hurt you?” Jack asked, touching her neck carefully and trying to shake the now-wet hair out of his eyes. 

“Not in the slightest. In fact,” she confessed, smoothing his hair back and holding his eyes firmly, “I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed that as much.”

His expression darkened promisingly. “What about these?” he asked, circling her breasts with his hands and squeezing. 

Phryne moaned. The sound was drowned by the heavy fall of the water and she moaned again, louder. “That was good too, Jack.”

He dropped a hand to her pubic hair; she spread her legs for him without thinking. Jack stroked her lightly for a second or two and then ghosted his fingers over her inner thighs. “And these? Good? Or too much?”

“Not enough, darling,” she said, her breasts rising and falling hard with her heavy breathing. “Never enough.”

Jack lifted his fingers to her lips; Phryne sucked them slowly and then pushed him down to his knees.

He splayed his hands over her arse and pressed his mouth against her cunt. In another moment, Phryne’s leg was over his shoulder. She fisted her hands into his hair and gave up trying to be quiet. Then his glorious fingers joined his tongue and she lost all control, rolling her hips against his mouth and thrusting and sobbing and coming. 

In a flash, Jack stood and turned her round, bracing her hands against the shower wall. “Wait,” she panted, reaching around and seizing his cock as it brushed over her entrance, because her diaphragm was still sitting beside the sink. “Not... not ready.” And then she waited, tense and breathless, to see what he would do next. 

What Jack did... was to press his erection into her fist instead, to rub his hands slowly over her back and buttock, and to lay a warm kiss between her shoulder blades. “Touch me?” he asked. “Please?”

“Oh, Jack... better than that.” 

She turned and sank to _her_ knees, and grinned up at him almost impishly. “One good turn, after all,” she said, and took him in her mouth. 

The sound he let out when her lips touched his cock was almost better than the way he tasted on her tongue when he came. He sounded... younger. Free.


	8. Chapter 8

“What next?” Phryne laughed, as they stood on the mat, drying one another off—properly, this time.

“Food,” said Jack firmly.

“You ate three hours ago!”

“Yes, and I’ve been working very hard since then. As have you,” he added, gently toweling the water from her face and then following with a kiss on the nose for good measure. “You weren’t even awake when I got here, and then you sat and watched me put away enough food for a battalion.”

“And I didn’t steal your toast!”

“ _And_ you didn’t steal my toast,” he agreed. “Which impressed me very much. So how about lunch for two, and this time you actually eat some of it?”

Phryne’s stomach chose that moment to rumble very decisively in favour of lunch, and after Jack was finished laughing at her, she telephoned down to the kitchen on the ground floor. In fifteen minutes, a waiter was at her front door, knocking impatiently. Phryne was otherwise occupied. “Give me my robe!” she all but squealed, as a still very naked Jack held it playfully out of her reach.

“Why? Have you immortal longings in you?” He raised his eyebrows in a silent dare. “Come get it, Phryne,” he teased gently, crushing the silk (burgundy, this time, rather than green). “We both know you can.”

“Keep it,” she taunted in return, and jerked a pair of peach satin lounge pajamas from her bureau drawer. “I think you’d look rather good in red.”

He watched her don the soft trousers and tunic, still grinning, but now with an air of wistful admiration about him. “‘I know that a woman is a dish for the gods, if the devil dress her not,’” he murmured, reached out to brush a lock of Phryne’s clean black hair behind her ear.

“Don’t worry, darling. Not even the devil could afford to dress me.”

She retrieved the basket from the impatient waiter at her front door while Jack hid in the bathroom, but she declined to allow the uniformed gentleman to lay the food out on the table. “I don’t want to spend another moment out of this bed,” she declared, unfolding the cloth and throwing it over the satin bedspread.

Jack emerged from the bathroom, chuckling. He had made good use of his time in hiding, and his hair and beard were now neatly combed. Phryne eyed him almost as hungrily as she did the cold roast chicken and cheese she was taking out of the basket. “Come along like a good boy, Jack,” she teased, opening up a bottle of white wine, “and eat your lunch.”

“You’re dressed,” he said, looking rather pouty.

“Well, either you can put clothes on… which I’d prefer you didn’t… or you can come help me out of these.”

His smile was wide and deliciously cheeky. “I’d love to… but somehow, I don’t think we’ll pay much attention to the food, after that.” He picked up her burgundy silk dressing gown from where he had laid it over the foot of the bed, and holding it lengthwise, tied it around his waist. “There. Now we’re free of distractions.”

Phryne smirked at him. “I rather doubt that,” she said, admiring the feral way the dark red cloth clung tightly to his body. She poured out the wine and then draped herself among the plates, offering him a glace.

Jack raised an eyebrow. “Mandragora?”

“Chardonnay. No fear that I’ll drink you to your bed, Antony, it’s already well past the ninth hour.”

He laid himself down and took the glass from Phryne. His fingers lingered on the back of her hand. “Thank you,” he murmured. 

Phryne sipped her wine with an expression of feline contentment and watched Jack devour the contents of the hamper. The crisp flavour was in stark contrast to the feeling of replete, dreamy indolence that Jack’s repeated attentions had caused to settle into her blood, and as pleasant as the feeling was (and it _was_ ), she wasn’t entirely ready to spend the rest of the day wallowing in afterglow. 

“You’re not eating,” Jack complained. “You promised, Phryne.”

“My dear man, I’m not the one who’s been living on tinned mutton and beans for the last three months.”

He shuddered. “Never again.”

Phryne chuckled and cut a thick wedge of apple tart for him. “Eat up. There’s plenty more where that came from. By the time the third hamper gets here, I might even get a bite in edgewise.”

Jack looked at her for a moment or two, then broke the tip off his piece of apple tart and held it out to her. 

“There’s a fork, you know.”

“I like using my fingers.”

Phryne tongued her canine thoughtfully, and leaned forward to let Jack slide the morsel of food past her lips. The fruit was sweet and gingery, the short crust buttery and rich, and underneath all was the taste of Jack’s skin mingling with the taste of herself painted on him, and the barely-rough ridges of his fingertips against her tongue. “Mmm…” When he pulled her forward for a slow kiss, she had no reason in the world to object. 

“You taste so good, Phryne,” he murmured, with a note of surrender. 

“You do too, Jack.” She rubbed her palm over his beard and then slid her fingers into his hair. “I think… we taste good together. We do seem to complement each other rather well.” Before the ramifications of that statement could sink in, Phryne returned her hand to his beard, stroking the soft little reddish-brown curls. “I do like this… it’s a pity that the current fashion for professional men insists on clean-shaven faces.”

“I thought you liked my strong jaw line,” Jack chuckled. “It’s rather hidden at the moment, or hadn’t you noticed?”

“It’s still there.” Phryne worked her fingers into the short hair until she found his skin, and pricked the underside of his chin gently with her nails. “See?”

He groaned and removed her hand. “Yes, love, I was aware that my face was only hidden, and not actually gone.” Jack paused and blinked, going over what he had just said. “Phryne, I—”

“Don’t,” she ordered, and pulled his mouth down to hers again. 

“What’s to like about my scruffy unkempt face?” Jack demanded, after she had released him, and consented to lie back against the pillows like a goddess and be fed bits of fruit and cheese. “I would have shaved it off hours ago, except that you’ve kept me rather busy.”

“It makes you look… unlike yourself.”

“And what is wrong with myself?”

“Nothing. But I do like novelty…” Phryne traced his lips with her fingertip. “And it’s a very novel thing to see you so… unkempt. So unprofessional. It’s _almost_ ,” she continued, watching his reactions, “as though you’re a different person, with this disguise to hide behind.”

He snorted. “I look like a tramp.” 

“No… You look, and since you crossed my threshold you have acted, like a man without a care in the world, a man free and unfettered for the first time in his life.” She licked her lips and smiled at him through her lashes. “It is… very appealing.”

“Hmm,” Jack said, frowning thoughtfully. “That’s a lot of praise, for a few months’ worth of not shaving.”

“Oh no, darling, the beard is just a symptom of what I’m praising. Although it does have pleasant attributes of its own… as the marks on my thighs attest to.”

He looked at her for a long, searching moment. Then he grinned his small hidden smile and set aside the remainder of the food. 


	9. Chapter 9

“Did you sail off the edge of the map, Jack, while you were playing at being a sailor?” Phryne commented from her spot on Jack’s chest, sometime later, after her pajamas and his make-shift loincloth had been discarded and they had rearranged themselves into more comfortable positions after their joint exertions. “Did you see monsters?”

Jack stroked Phryne’s hair, breathing in her scent. “I’ve seen monsters on land all my life, so I didn't look while I was at sea. But I saw the ocean and the sky do things together that terrified me and left me breathless. I saw the stars on the surface of the water in seas so becalmed I could look down and feel like I was flying.” He worked his callused fingertips against her scalp, and smiled. “I saw mermaids and heard the songs of sirens, but none that tempted me.”

Phryne hummed thoughtfully.

“And you? What did you see, up there in the sky?”

“I saw the great cities of the world, looking like children’s toy towns. I flew alongside birds, and longed to fly higher, to never need to land. …I saw many, many, _many_ places where I was tempted to tip my father overboard. I saw the sun rise over Europe, and wondered if it was setting in Australia at the same time.”

“No Martians coming down in their space rockets, all glowing blue?”

“Not this trip,” she grinned. “Speaking of things that glow, Dottie seems very happy, if her letters are any indication.”

Jack chuckled richly. “Before I left, I was convinced that if Collins was any more smug and pleased with life, he would have been floating on air. But the bloom’s not off the rose yet. They’ll both probably have drifted at least halfway back down to Earth by the time I have to go back.”

She looked up, a little worried. “You think they’re in for a rough patch?”

“I think they married very young, Phryne, and they were both very different people a year ago.” 

“One could say the same thing about us.”

Jack smiled slightly. “Well, we’re certainly not old… Thankfully Hugh’s a good-hearted fellow, and Dot’s got a good head on her shoulders. They’ll find their balance.”

“…We did.”

His lean body stilled beneath her. “Did we, now…”

“What do you think this is?”

“I thought neither of us knew.”

Phryne planted her palms on Jack’s chest and rose up over him. “Jack…”

“Phryne. I am…” He chuckled softly. “I’m—” 

“In love with me. I know.”

“I’m so afraid of you,” Jack continued, as though he had not heard her. “Everything about you, everything you do to me, frightens me. Frightens me enough to have left home and job and country behind to come after you, because… as much as you frighten me, Phryne Fisher, the absence of you frightens me so much more.”

Phryne began to tremble. All of the emotions she had tried so hard to suppress since Jack had appeared at her door in all his dirty disreputable glory rose up and crashed over her, and she could not speak. All she could do was cling to him, her nails digging into his skin, and shake. 

Gently, Jack covered her hands with his own and uncurled them, and slid her arms down around his neck to that she was flat against him. Then he reached for the blankets and covered her warmly. 

It was a long time before she found her voice again. “What’s next, Jack? For… us? If we’re both too scared to let go… what will happen when things go wrong? When the bloom’s off the rose?” 

His lips curved against her cheekbone. “I think we’ve already lopped the blossoms off of _several dozen_ roses in the last year or so.”

The mental image was a little on the macabre side, but it made Phryne giggle. “How romantic, Jack. You’ll turn my head.”

“Heaven forbid,” he murmured, his warm rough voice stroking through her blood. “I have some knowledge of roses.”

“I didn’t know you were a floraphile, Jack.”

“Mmm. Orchids are my specialty, but I’ve also got a soft spot for roses. The thing about roses, you see… the strongest species are damned near impossible to kill.” He caressed her skin softly with his lips. 

“I can do strong. I can do stubborn. I can do ‘impossible to kill.’ But this… I’m adrift, Jack. I can see the stars, but I can’t tell if I’m falling or flying.”

“Whichever it is, I’m with you. And keeping track of all these metaphors are starting to hurt my head.”

“You know what I’m afraid of, Jack.” 

“Tell me.”

“You _know_.”

“I suspect. I want to be sure.”

“Silence. Isolation. Never being allowed to be alone. Being kept alone when I don’t want to be. Never knowing what to expect. Being expected to know things without being told. Being punished for fighting back.”

“…Do you think I would treat you like that?”

“I never said it was rational. I said it was what I was afraid of.” Phryne turned and brushed her lips over Jack’s beard. She tasted herself. “There’s a whole world out there, Jack. One man, no matter how noble… or loved… isn’t always enough in comparison to that.”

“I’m not asking to be always enough, Phryne.” His hands slipped from her hair to her shoulders, clasping them gently. “I’ve been married, and I don’t think I could do it again. There were too many expectations, from her, from friends… from myself. I wanted the world once, too…”

She touched his face with the very edges of her fingertips. “And now?”

“I want _you_ , Phryne. Whatever that means. However you’re willing to share yourself with me.” He turned and kissed her fingers, and nuzzled his cheek into her palm. “Even if it means sharing you with the world.”

Phryne closed her eyes and basked in his words, his voice and his lips moving delicately across the skin of her hand, and the strange sweet new feeling of the world being laid open before her by a man’s declaration of love, rather than being chained away from her because of it. The weight of Jack Robinson’s heart was no more than a feather in her hand. A feather… a pirate’s treasure. “So strange…”

“What is?”

“To have been given my freedom, and be so uninterested in taking it.” And she laughed at Jack’s expression. “Call it ‘the perversity of women’.”

“I’d rather call it ‘Phryne Fisher’,” he cheeked in return, and kissed her. 

His cock was half-hard against her thigh and Phryne touched him as he rolled her onto her back, trying to rouse him. “Gently,” Jack gasped, mouthing her throat. 

“A little tender, darling?”

“A little tender and a little tired. I’m not used to this kind of work anymore.”

She dragged her nails up his groin and belly and kissed him boldly. “You’ll have to get back into training, Jack Robinson, if you want to keep up with me.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I accidentally another chapter.

He slipped inside her with a deep groaning sigh and rested his knees between her thighs and his forehead against her breastbone. Phryne smoothed her hands soothingly over his lower back and his buttocks and his ribs. She could feel his muscles trembling in tiny butterfly flutters under her palms. “I’m not sure how much longer I _can_ keep this up,” he muttered, chuckling and turning his face to kiss the top of her breast. “All that time alone, and now you’ve wrung Christ only knows how many climaxes out of me.”

“Four,” Phryne replied, with a low and very pleased-sounding purr. “And you’ve done the same to me… although,” she added, grinned at the smug face he lifted for her to kiss, “I did get myself off once last night.”

“That doesn’t count. I wasn’t here.”

“But I was thinking of you at the time.”

“Still… four? Really?”

“Four times. In the last…” She pushed a pillow out of the way and peered at the little clock on her nightstand. “Five and a half hours.”

Jack groaned and buried his face in her cleavage. “I’m going to have a heart attack and die, if we keep going at this rate,” he said, his voice muffled by her flesh. “But it’ll be worth it…”

“We’re making up for lost time,” she assured him, stroking his tousled hair. “I won’t make these kinds of demands from you every night, I promise.” 

There was a pause. “…Every night?”

She almost wept at the hope in his voice. “Every night, Jack, I will want you in my bed. I know it won’t always happen. Sometimes it won’t be possible. But I will always want you exactly where you are right now.” 

Another pause, and then Phryne felt a pinprick of warmth between her breasts, and then another. “Jack, darling…”

He rose up and kissed her deeply, gathering her into his arms and doing something with his hips that drove his cock so firmly into her cunt that for an instant Phryne forgot how to breath. She cradled his head in her hands and kissed away his tears, then took him by the shoulders and rolled him onto his back. His eyes as he gazed up at her were almost too tender to bear. “I can’t help that I love you,” he whispered. “But I can’t be where you aren’t. Not anymore.”

Phryne kissed him softly. “Then come with me, Jack Robinson.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere. Anywhere. Nowhere at all.”

His smile was something out of a dream, wide and bright and rare as a Spanish doubloon. She pressed her body to his and made love with him slowly, and tucked that smile away in the secret recesses of her heart. 

She traced the shape of his bearded lips with her kisses, after she had gently roused him to another gasping climax. “I plan to make you smile like that at least once a day, from now on,” she told him, reluctant to move from the safe warm solid surface of his chest. 

Jack smiled the small secret half-smile she was accustomed to, and rumbled his wordless acquiescence to this declaration. He slid Phryne from her perch and turned onto his side, curling around her and burying his face in her hair. She wrapped her arms around his middle, and they slept again. 

Phryne was woken, slowly and sweetly, by the feeling of Jack’s lips softly brushing a trail of kisses over her collarbones. His hands circled her breasts, stroking the marks he had left on her with the reverence of a devoted acolyte. His gentleness, his quiet pride and gratitude, his utter lack of possessiveness, astonished her. “Dear Jack,” she murmured, smiling sleepily. “My Jack. You’ll stay?”

“I have nowhere else I need to be,” he reminded her, solemnly, this time. 

“Then why, my darling dashing pirate boy, did you wake me?”

His grin was tender and wicked. “Because, siren of the skies, if I’m to stay with you until you decide to fly away again—” 

“And after.”

“ _And_ after,” Jack amended amiably, punctuating his words with small kisses that just barely skirted her tightening nipples, “it occurs to me that I might wish to make myself more presentable in polite society.”

“To hell with polite society,” Phryne groaned, arching into his touch. “There’s nothing polite about what I want to do with you.”

Jack set his teeth delicately to her fragile skin, just for the pleasure of hearing her sharp gasp. “I took six months of leave, Phryne. Of which I have five left, and one of which will need to be used to get home. Do you plan to keep me in this flat for four months, ravishing me from morning til night and feeding me grapes in bed?”

“…It’s a tempting thought…” She took a lock of his over-long wavy hair and tugged it lightly, smirking. “The company would certainly be better than anything I could get elsewhere.”

“Unless you’d rather I wasn’t seen out on the town with you?” 

The overtly casual tone snagged at Phryne’s heart. “Oh no, Jack Robinson. You’ve just spent the better part of the day compromising my virtue very thoroughly, and I’m over the moon about it. But don’t think it gets you out of playing the part of devoted escort at every Christmas and New Year’s party that I’ve been invited to. And I’ve been invited to _all_ of them.”

“So the price I pay for coming after you really _is_ to ‘come with you everywhere’,” he grumbled, his blue eyes twinkling invitingly. “I might have known.”

“Unless you’d rather stay here and decorate an empty flat and wait for my return every night?”

“It might be worth it,” Jack said, after a moment’s thought. “If I knew you were just as eager to get back to me as I was to get to you.” He raised his eyebrows at her and then returned to his oral exploration of her breasts, carefully mapping them over and over again. 

“Oh, I would be, Jack, I—oh… God, keep doing that and I’m never leaving this bed. I will live in this bed and die happily in your arms.”

Jack laughed richly around her nipple and nudged her thighs apart with his knees. “‘I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap…’” His fingers pressed into the tight supple silky-wet flesh of her cunt. “‘And be buried in thy eyes—and moreover, I will go with thee to thy uncle’s.’”

Phryne’s whole body clenched in pleasure. “Father’s, Benedick, darling. Or technically, mother’s. Mother owns the townhouse. I made sure of that.”

“Probably a wise idea.” 

She squeezed her muscles around his fingers; he sucked harder at her breast. “So,” Phryne gasped, “is this all an elaborate hint that you need to shave all your lovely scruff?”

“I’m afraid so. But I’ll make it up to you…”

Phryne pulled his head up for a searing kiss, and then promptly pushed him down between her legs.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well that only took two weeks. *glares at obstreperous OTP*

Jack licked a playful stripe up the line of her cunt and then did her one step better – he slid to the floor and stood up on his knees, hooked his arms under her legs, and hauled her to the edge of the bed. She had a brief glimpse of his eyes, a hot burning blue, and then he all but disappeared. 

“Oh _fuck_ ,” Phryne gasped as his tongue collided with her over-stimulated flesh. “Ohhh, Jack…” She smiled wildly and tried to prop herself up on her elbows so she could watch him. It was difficult. Every stroke of his fingers, every press of his tongue, made her shake uncontrollably. “Jack,” she whimpered, biting her lip hard.

He paused. “That’s a sound I’ve never heard you make,” he rumbled. His beard scratched gently at her thigh. “Did I hurt you?”

“No, god, no, I’m just… past the point of needing to be _brought_ to orgasm, my beautiful man.” He closed his eyes briefly and nuzzled his nose into her wet pubic hair. Phryne had to bite her lower lip again. Even that light touch was enough to nearly make her scream. “And you’re… very good at this. In fact it’s hard to believe you’re as out of practice as you claim.”

Jack chuckled against her skin and returned to his ministrations. “I have had a lot of time to plan this, Phryne Fisher.” He slipped his hands under her arse and canted her pelvis up, so that her splayed legs were in the air, and pressed his bearded mouth full against her cunt.

“Jack!” Phryne bucked into his mouth, moaning sharply. 

“I love doing this to you,” she thought she heard Jack groan. Or perhaps she felt him say it, and the words worked their way into her bones and into her blood. She gave up on trying to stay upright and fell back hard against the mattress. 

“More,” she gasped, reached down and fisting her fingers into his unkempt hair. “More, more, _please_ , oh god…”

“Phryne,” he moaned. She panted and tugged at his hair, and for a moment he looked up at her and she was stunned. There was adoration in his eyes, pride and playfulness and lust, but above all, adoration. Phryne wrapped his hair securely around her fingers and tugged sharply. Jack let out an eager whimper. 

“Surprise after surprise,” she smiled. She gentled her caresses and then scooted backwards. “Get up here, Jack.” She took his hand and pulled him up, twisted him into his back and kissed him hard. Teeth and lips and tongue collided messily, and then Phryne balanced her knees on Jack’s shoulder. “Now, keep going.”

He splayed his hands over her inner thighs and opened her wider, inching his fingers into her cunt, spreading her lips to give his tongue more room. Phryne rocked her hips sharply. “Hands off, Jack,” she teased, grabbing his forearms. Without a murmur, he obeyed her, putting his hands on her lower back instead and bracing her as she leaned back to ride his mouth. Her thigh muscles gripped his head desperately. 

“Yes, Jack, my _god_ , yes, just like tha…yes _fuck, yes_!”

She flung a hand back wildly, searching for purchase on any reasonably sturdy surface that would catch her as she fell. But there was no need. Jack’s hands were steady against her lower back, holding her. 

It felt like a long time before Phryne could catch her breath and claw her way back into her own body. When she did, Jack was nuzzling her inner thighs tenderly, his lips and his beard like gossamer against her sweaty skin. “Are you all right?” he asked.

Phryne had to laugh. He sounded a bit hoarse. “I am, yes. You are very… very good at this.”

Jack grinned rather broadly. “Perhaps,” he conceded, and then lifted her up just enough so that he could sit up. Phryne found herself in his lap, eye-level with his blue eyes full of laughter. He had so often tried to hide his moods from her, in the past. This new openness was deliciously unsettling. “Or perhaps I just like the way you taste…”

“No, it’s more than that.” She had experience of many men’s mouths, after all. She knew the difference. “It feels… almost as though you’re… I’m not sure.” She traced his lips with thoughtful fingers. “Luxuriating in me.”

His smile shifted, became gentler. “Well, I do like indulging in my women,” he murmured, punctuating his words with slow deep skillful kisses so that she could taste how their flavours mingled and multiplied in their intensity. “And you are a woman who advocates... indulging... in life’s sensual pleasures...”

“Mmm, I am at that, Jack Robinson.” She therefore closed her eyes and indulged in the pleasure of his kisses for a time. His cock stood up between them, tremulously hard and twitching against her pelvis. Phryne rolled her hips slightly, grinding against it, more for the gentle amusement of hearing Jack groan than for any more prurient reasons. Those could come later... and would come...

Finally, Jack sighed. “I think we’ve stalled long enough, Miss Fisher. The beard must go, if I’m ever to leave the privacy of your flat. Unless you want London to think you’ve taken up with a man who talks of nothing but frozen mutton and the briny deep.”

“Can’t I drown the mutton in the briny deep and be squired about by a dashing sea captain?”

The tiny smile that touched his lips was surprisingly sad. “I can be whoever you want me to be when we’re alone, Phryne, but in the world, I can be no one except myself.”

His words echoed in her ears. There was a curious knell of defeat hidden in them, somewhere, but she couldn’t put her finger on where or why. She stroked her fingertips down his cheek and them kissed him lightly. “Where are your shaving things?”

“In the bag I dropped by the front door, when you hauled me through it. Why?”

“I want to shave you.” Jack raised his eyebrows. For a long few moments, Phryne bore his probing gaze. “If that’s all right with you?”

His expression of steady-eyed contemplation never wavered. “I think so,” he said at last. He disengaged himself from her and went out of the bedroom, returning a few moments later with a shapeless, much-traveled canvas sack. 

“Surely you didn’t start your journey with that!” Phryne laughed, torn between admiration of the picturesqueness and horror at the nameless stains the bag carried. 

“Of course not. I had some very hideous luggage that I bought on a moment’s notice, most of which I had to abandon when I signed onto the _Gibraltar_.” He dug through the bag’s innards and pulled out a small leather case, and then laughed at Phryne’s confusion. “You didn’t really think the ship was called the _SS Mutton_ , did you?”

“ _No_ ,” Phryne retorted, sticking her tongue out at him. “I didn’t think about the damned ship at all.”

“Fair enough.” Jack cocked an eyebrow at her and then nodded his head towards the bathroom. “Shall we?”

He was chuckling again as she brushed past him and caught his hand to tug him inside. “Now what’s so funny?”

“We’ve been in and out of this room all day, and it just struck me… our first meeting was in a bathroom.”

“Hmm. So this is oddly appropriate, somehow.”

“Somehow,” Jack agreed, and solemnly handed her the case containing his shaving kit.


	12. Chapter 12

There was no chair in Phryne’s opulent bathroom, either for her own convenience or for the better shaving of gentleman friends, so Jack fetched one from the dining room. “Hmm, perfect,” Phryne purred, sidling onto his lap. “Just the right height.”

“And much more comfortable than the toilet seat,” Jack replied, chuckling as she rubbed her cheeks, cat-like, against the week’s growth of beard that she had become so fond of. “But unless you’d like me to get _too_ comfortable, I think you should get up.” He choked off a sudden sharp groan and sternly removed her hand from his manhood. “That is not what I meant and you know it.”

Phryne laughed at him and took her distracting self from the comfortable perch of Jack's thighs. “Would you prefer to shower again, to heat your face?” she asked, beginning to lay out his shaving things around the sink. “Or will hot face flannels do?”

“Oh, there are so many responses to that... and I suspect you’ll take shameless advantage of me no matter what I decide to do, so I will duck into the shower again – briefly – and by myself.”

“Naturally,” said Phryne, with admirable false demureness. 

Jack tilted his head at her with an expression that had nothing to do with shame, and stepped behind the shower curtain.

While the hot water ran and he got his face thoroughly wet with something other than her, Phryne took stock of his shaving kit. It was surprisingly well-provisioned, and she wondered if he’d stopped after making port in England to buy fresh oil and soap, although the badger shaving brush which had seen better days made her reconsider that somewhat. And then there was the razor and strop.

“I wouldn’t have pegged you for a straight razor man,” she commented, speaking loudly enough to be heard over the water.

“Traditional man, Miss Fisher,” he replied breezily, and then chuckled. “My father taught me how to shave with one of those, before I had anything that could even remotely be called a beard. Scared me half to death. I prefer a safety razor, these days, but it was impossible to get hold of new blades on the ship, so I got that off one of the lads.” 

She picked up the straight razor carefully by the handle, which was old yellowed ivory, and opened the blade. She noted the metal was unblemished by stains or nicks in the steel, and concluded that both its previous and current owners had taken meticulous care of it. The water stopped abruptly, and she resumed her normal speaking volume. “This would have cost you a fortune at the best gentleman’s shop in the city.”

“Didn’t cost me a cent. The fellow I got it from thought it was unlucky,” Jack said. 

Phryne looked up and saw him standing on the bath mat, dripping, his short scruffy beard soaked clean through. “How so?”

“Apparently a former shipmate of his committed suicide with it.”

“How awful. I’m surprised he didn’t throw it away.”

“It was left to him. He didn’t feel right just chucking it overboard or pawning it. But if he gave it to someone who needed it, well, that was another thing altogether.” Jack dried his extremities briefly and then resumed his spot on the chair. “Sailors are a superstitious lot, but not without reason, I’d say.” He eyed the razor thoughtfully, as Phryne held it in her hands. “Have you done this before?” he asked, settled back in the chair and letting her lay a towel around his shoulders.

“Once or twice. Although never with anyone who possessed such an admirable jaw as yours…” Phryne kissed his lips lightly. “So I shall have to be very careful.” 

His eyes caught hers as she drew away and made her heart skid in her chest. There were very… symbolic implications, of her having a knife pressed to Jack’s throat, of him being at her mercy. If that look was any indication, he was as aware of it as she was.

Jack held her gaze for a long, heated moment, and then glanced down. “Any chance of a second towel?”

“Sorry,” Phryne purred, giving his beard a last loving stroke, “I’m running low. But don’t worry—I will gladly help you wash off any stray hairs or shaving cream.”

“…That should not sound as erotic as it does,” Jack said, chuckling.

She smiled and reached for a bottle of oil. “And this, darling?” She poured a suitable quantity into her palm and then rubbed her hands together. He gave her a slow warm blink in silent reply and then inclined his head, allowing her to massage the oil into his beard and into the skin underneath. She was very thorough, working the oil into his jaw and his throat and his cheeks, his chin, around his lips, and into his sideburns. 

The look Jack gave her when she pulled back told of the vast mental fantasies he was having, all of them involving her and oil, but beyond that, Phryne couldn’t guess, and she would not let herself be distracted again.

She tipped the bar of shaving soap into its cup and worked up a good lather, all while Jack sat at quietly admired the little ripples and undulations that the stirring motion of her arm caused in her adjacent breast. Phryne could hardly glance at herself in the mirror without grinning.

“On the one hand, this is all becoming rather ridiculous.”

“Hmm. True. But on the other hand...” Jack’s eyes slid closed as she began to apply the lather to his face, the brush stroking in small up-and-down motions. “On the other hand,” he murmured, “I don’t really care.”

Phryne chuckled. “That’s the spirit.” She set the cup aside and began to strop the straight razor thoughtfully across the belt-like piece of leather. Now it was her turn to conjure up illicit fantasies that would be banished in the blink of an eye... She tested the blade delicately against against her thumb. “Perfect. Ready?”

His blue eyes looked up at her, calm and steady and clear. Phryne combed her fingers through his damp hair. "Head back, darling."

She took her time to find how much pressure he liked on the blade, if he gasped with pleasure or discomfort when the sharp edge kissed his skin. He breathed in fast little sips as she moved around him, as though he was taking hot, ginger sips of tea. Unseen, Phryne let a smirk of deep pleasure spread over her face. She rather liked the idea that she was heating the very air as she orbited his body.

But otherwise he was completely relaxed, almost drowsy while she worked, and when she let the blade linger on his skin once or twice, she saw the corners of his lips just barely turn up in the way he had, of almost-invisibly smiling, and she knew that he was enjoying the danger as well as the safety of trusting her with a knife's edge at his throat. It was her favourite part of playing this game, seeing her lover wrapped up so completely in _knowing_ that she had the power to hurt him, and knowing equally that she would not.

It was only when his throat was bare, and she was testing the smoothness with her lips, that she realized how affected Jack was by all her delicate, careful, dangerous ministrations. His fist was wrapped around his cock, not moving, just as his throat was barely moving with his quick, shallow breathing. 

The intensity and the depth of how intimate they were in that moment hit Phryne like a freight train. It was more than the closeness they had shared in the past, or the sex that had consumed them for most of the day. Now she had Jack Robinson quite literally by the throat, and not only was it clear that he felt entirely unthreatened by it… he was _aroused_ by it.

Her knees threatened to turn to jelly.

“Have you ever let any other woman do this for you?” she asked, rinsing the blade carefully in the basin and working hard not to let the tremor in her legs spread to her voice. 

“Rosie.” He took a deep breath and opened his eyes. “When we were first married. It was…” A hint of wistfulness touched Jack’s gaze. “It was new. Intimate. Exciting… And it was a long time ago. It’s been years since I’ve been able to allow anyone else to do this for me.”

Phryne’s lips twitched. “Not even a barber?”

“I’ve known some godawful barbers in my time,” he said dryly. "I do my own shaving."

"Until now."

"Yes."

The intensity of the feeling only grew as she continued to shave away the beard, until she could see the familiar angles and planes of his face again. To her surprise, she felt tears pushing behind her eyes, determined to get out. The dashing bearded sailor who had bedded her so gloriously was Jack, of course, but this… this was _her_ Jack. 

“Hello, Jack,” she said, stroking his velvety-smooth cheek with shaking fingers. “Nice to see you again.”


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eternal thanks to Projectcyborg for helping me work through the knots. ♥

As she had so solemnly promised, Phryne wiped off all the stray hairs and shaving cream from Jack’s face and chest, but her eyes never left the blue eyes that seemed all the bluer now for the smooth clean-smelling skin that surrounded them. She tipped aftershave into her hand and worked it between her palms, and then spread the fragrant lotion onto his cheeks. Jack let out a low appreciative rumble and pulled her into his lap, gazing up at her all the while. 

When his smooth skin had soaked up all the lotion, Phryne threaded her fingers into his damp wavy hair and kissed him with slow, unhurried passion. After all the time that had passed, after all that had passed between them, it seemed now as though they had all the time in the world. She closed her eyes and suckled his lower lip delicately. The tracery of his ears was beautiful beneath her palms, and the scent and sound and taste of his breath intoxicated her, satisfied her, made her hungry. 

His callused hands were warm against her shoulder blades, warmer even than the humid air of the bathroom. Phryne pressed her knees against his hips and rocked her mons gently against his erection. “Darling…” She dropped a hand to his cock and would have shifted to take him inside her, but for his fingers curling around her wrist. 

“Not yet,” he murmured against her lips, nibbling softly. Phryne’s hand fell away, but Jack’s touch lingered on her pubic bone, stroking through the tangle of wiry curls. His fingertips on her clit sent a shock zipping through her.

“Bed?” she gasped, resting her forehead against his.

He nodded, his eyes full of her. “Bed.”

She rose from his lap in a cloud of musk and hazy sweetness, drawing him up from the chair and drinking in the rapt, reverent expression on his face, and led him to her bed again. He caught her gently by the hips and pulled her on top of him, twisting her around so that his mouth was between her thighs and hers was level with his groin. 

Phryne moaned aloud when his tongue hit her oversensitive flesh. His smooth face felt incredible, like cool satin. Without the beard in the way, as dashing as it was, Jack could go _so_ much deeper. She could feel his jaw moving against her cleft, his cheekbones digging into her thighs. It was as though he was impressing himself into her cunt, so that the next man who went down on her would sense the ghost of Jack Robinson there. 

Phryne grinned broadly, going through a mental list of her favourite past London lovers and wondering how each of them would react to finding such a noticeable marking of territory between her thighs. Some would balk... some would approve. None would have the same reaction as the next. She so adored variety in her men.

She worked her mouth and hand slowly over his cock, taking her time, indulging in the feel of the delicate hot skin against her lips. They were both going slowly this time, and Phryne knew that sooner or later they would be entirely spent and in need of more than a simple nap. But he felt so good, better than she had ever dared to dream, and they fit together so well... 

“Jaaack,” she moaned, rolling her hips desperately over his mouth. His hands were steady on her thighs, holding her until she stopped shaking.

He rolled her over and pulled her upright, into his arms and into his lap. “I want you like this,” he murmured, guiding her legs around his waist, “sitting up.”

It was perfect, intimate and reassuring, all the things she most needed, and it had the added delight of allowing Jack to put his freshly shaved cheeks between her breasts, which was lovely for both of them. Phryne reached between them and guided his cockhead into her folds, and sighed as he sank into her again. 

“Good?”

“So good, Jack.”

His cock was glorious, thick and hard inside her, but practicality dictated that she couldn’t count on that for long, and Phryne wanted to get herself off, quickly, before she pushed her exhausted inspector past his limits. But when she tried to pick up her pace, Jack slid his hands down to her hips. “Not yet.”

She scowled at him and tried again to speed up. Jack’s hands held her down a little more firmly. “Not yet, Phryne. Not until I say so.”

Terror bolted through Phryne’s body, and it took every ounce of her strength not to shrink away from Jack’s touch. He couldn’t know what he was asking of her, surely... to willingly give up control of her own pleasure, of her body, would mean that she trusted her lover completely, without question. And to grant that to Jack would mean admitting to herself the thing she had been both accepting and denying all day, that she did trust Jack, not simply with her life, but enough to give up control of her body to him for a little while. 

She did trust him that much. More, even, in ways that she could hardly fathom. 

Phryne put her arms around his neck and kissed him, trembling. “All right.”

Jack smiled. “Thank you, Phryne.” His thumbs stroked the soft skin of her waist reassuringly. She shivered, and from far more than simply the tender adoration in his touch. 

She hadn’t allowed herself to face the truth. She had not given herself even five minutes to confront her feelings, how deeply she loved Jack and how much that frightened her. Love, committed intense romantic entangling love, was the same in her mind as standing naked and bound before the entire Commonwealth Parliament. She remembered the last time she had allowed herself to fall in love, and fall it had been, so far down into an abyss of smothering cruelty that for years, the mere mention of the word ‘love’ had made Phryne’s skin crawl and her lungs seize up.

There was none of that with Jack. She knew she wanted him with her, that she couldn’t bear to be apart from him for so long again, but until he had said ‘Not yet’, she hadn’t understood just how deeply she had fallen, and she still almost didn’t believe it. There was no smothering in Jack’s touch, no possession in his eyes as his movements drew soft cries from her lips. He loved her, and instead of wanting to run, she wanted to meet him halfway. The pressure in her chest doubled and tripled and she felt as though she was going to burst into tears from the desire simply to love him as much as he did her.

Jack’s hands on her hips were gentle and firm and while she kissed him and brought her breasts to his lips for him to worship, his movements never faltered, fucking her with deep, slow thrusts that brought her just barely skating to the edge of climax, and holding her there. 

He had the advantage over her. He was a naturally contemplative person, and he’d had a long ocean voyage _(my darling dashing pirate boy)_ to come to grips with precisely how momentous a step he was taking. He knew what he wanted and what he was risking and he had likely already tried to account for as many variables as possible and what he would have done if this massive romantic overture _(I can’t be where you aren’t. Not anymore.)_ had gone pear-shaped. He could afford to lavish her with confidence, with surety and serenity. 

Phryne... could not. She wasn’t a person who thought about things and weighed the advantages and disadvantages beforehand, certainly not when the circumstance was a matter of the flesh and, apparently, of the heart. She just _went_ , and sometimes the results were unexpected... like today. Part of her was still waiting for him to even arrive in London, and had yet to work through the fact that he was there, in her bed. She hadn’t expected him to be there, certainly not as he had been that morning, exhausted and scruffy and ready to eat her alive. 

Finally Phryne fell back, bracing herself with her hands on the rumpled bedclothes. Jack unfolded his legs and worked his knees under her arse. The angle left Phryne shaking and desperate. She brought one hand to her clit but Jack caught her wrist gently. 

“No.”

“God, Jack, _please!_ ”

“Look at me, Phryne,” he rasped, splaying his hand against one side of her flushed, sweaty face. “Look at me and come. Come for me.”

It was hard, panting and struggling to maintain her rhythm, to keep her eyes open when all she wanted to do was to fall into the warm dark of release, but harder still to watch Jack watch her, to let him see on her face and in her eyes all of the emotions she had tried so desperately to hide from him, and to see the expression on his face when he realized... when he saw... 

It was too much. Phryne came apart in Jack’s arms, sobbing. 

He had the advantage over her. She had underestimated her man... and most dangerous of all, she had underestimated herself.

They stayed wrapped together for a long time, while she cried and he held her. Finally she calmed, and hugged him tighter. 

He brushed a kiss over her temple. “Phryne? Did I hurt you?”

“No! No, no, I’ve... I’ve never let anyone do that to me before.”

He was silent for a second or two. “Did I go too far?”

“Jack, I...” Phryne ran out of words, so that all she could do was kiss him, and mold closer into his embrace. She could taste her tears on his lips. They were almost sweet. “I’ll go anywhere with you.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short and sweet to end it. I think Phryne and Jack are as exhausted as I am. ;) 
> 
> This was one of the most intimate and difficult stories I've ever written. Thank you for playing along. ♥ If you’re on Tumblr, please consider following me at [gaslightgallows.tumblr.com](http://gaslightgallows.tumblr.com) for more fic, reblogs about writing, and lots of randomness.

The warmth of the bed and the depth of her sleep urged Phryne to return to unconsciousness, but the warmth of the man beside her was more enticing, and to her drowsy surprise, Jack was already awake and sitting up against his pillows. “What time is it?” she murmured, cuddling closer to his ribcage. 

“About half past six,” Jack rumbled softly, running his fingers through her hair, and chuckling when she grimaced. 

“Good lord, what a hideous hour.” Phryne pulled the covers over her head. “Wake me when it’s noon.” 

She felt Jack turn and the blankets being brushed back enough for him to kiss her temple. “Only if you want your maid to throw me into the streets in nothing but my bare skin.”

“Hngh?”

“She poked her head in twenty minutes ago, saw the two lumps in the bed, and let out a string of Cockney that I couldn’t understand but I will assume was some sort of vicious swearing.”

“Yes, Amelia does have an impressive mouth on her. Well, shall we go and assault her eyes with your well-groomed official self, Detective Inspector?” Phryne let out a groan and pushed herself up on her hands, intending to turn over onto her back, get up, and reluctantly start her day. Instead, Jack’s hands slid around her torso and pulled her close, pressing his lips gently to the space between her small breasts. “Mmm...”

“You all right?”

“Yes, love,” Phryne smiled, tugging at his loose wavy curls. 

He looked up at her. In the dimness of her bedroom, his blue eyes seemed to glow. They had talked a little, the night before, after she had quieted, but for everything that had been said aloud, ten thousand things had been merely implied. “You don’t have to keep saying it, you know. If it makes you... uncomfortable.”

“Jack.” She laced her finger behind his neck, gently urging him to rest his forehead on her breastbone. “I don’t do anything that makes _me_ uncomfortable.” She dropped a kiss to the crown of his head, inhaling the lingering scents of his soap and their lovemaking. “Or if I do... it’s with someone I trust.”

The soft, intimate sound of his breathing against her breasts filled Phryne with warmth. She laid her head his tousled hair, and they stayed that way for some time, listening to one another.


End file.
